It’s a feature not a bug. Wyden-Bennett is the theoretical underpinning of Obamacare. The goal is to move everyone to the exchanges eventually, but not blow up the employer-based system all at once.

The fact is a lot of this isn’t going to go according to plan. The high-risk pool is going to quickly go over-budget. Medicaid costs are going to be much greater than expected. They Medicare payment board is going to run into a firestorm of opposition.

As has been said many times, Obamacare doesn’t meaningfully control costs and so the whole thing is an exercise in futility. Costs will come down anyway if the country runs out of money. But meanwhile we will have forced everyone to buy private insurance and weakened employee benefits–for nothing.

Not for nothing. To claim a major victory before an election and to enrich the plutocracy. Succeeded at both. That it’s BS is not relevant to meeting their objectives.

It’s a feature, it is the claimed “cost savings” in the HIR bill. Cost savings to employers.

Employers now pass the complete costs of Heath Insurance to the employees (except for executives), and about 2020 to 2025 the penalties for employers will be dropped.

If you believe the employers will increase their employee’s pay by the amount of the health insurance costs, I have a nice bridge you can buy, really cheaply.

Should have just been medicare for all. This is a boondoggle for us and a welfare system for insurance companies and other large corporations.

This was the plan all along, wasn’t it? That’s what I thought once it became chrystal clear that everyone was a whore for Big Ins, Big Pharma, Big Medical Devices. Not really news to me, but good post. Get the info out so everyone can see just how “socialist” this is. Thanks to all those who pushed so hard from the right in order to “save themselves” from the horror scourge of “socialized medicine” (but don’t touch my medicare).

Well, medicare is next on the chopping block.

Yes, but the Koch brothers hired Dick Armey to train the Tea Party to think that was somehow teh evil incarnate. Of course, it really didn’t matter all that much that the Tea Partiers acted out the way they did. This would’ve happened this way, anyway.

Are we still waiting for confirmation of the ‘Gruber Postulate’, that decreased costs for companies that used to provide coverage, will result in higher wages?
No? I thought not.

It worked for Gruber, didn’t it? He got paid very well for helping companies get to cut their health insurance costs.

LOL!

Sad, but true.

Yes, I stand corrected :-)

Yep. Overkill. They got to believing their own crap that Orahma is some kind of “socialist” instead of the plutocrat we know him to be.

At 300% of the poverty line, the subsidy is already down to 25%.
Any employer that thinks this “generous” subsidy is enough to make insurance affordable is not living in the real world.

Onitgoes: don’t you get it? The right is as suspicious as we are about this weak employer mandate, they know as well as we do that the employers will drop health care coverage. But that will force people onto exchanges, the chaos due to medical shortages and cost over-runs will create another Rahmalicious crisis, and the gubmint will just move in and take over. That’s socialism, right? ‘Course that’ll threaten to bankrupt the country, so the gubmint will take over a whole lot more stuff to control prices — see how it goes? Socialism!

Who coulda anticipated that a shitty law would have a shitty outcome.

Ditto 1000x

Everybody but the Orange Satan apparently

It’s about the same strategy a lot of individuals are looking at: a relatively small fine for not joining the Insurance Company Scam, or a big bill if you do try to buy insurance on your own. (Given that companies also get hit with the huge premium increases, I’m not blaming them for this kind of thing.)

Have fun in the individual market, folks!

Where I’ve been for the last dozen years until my premiums went up to $1,000 a month and I’ve been coverage free.

What those who are covered by their company don’t realize is that, yeah, they were covered by their company.

My brother’s plan was $500, of which he wasn’t even aware until he got laid off (employer-based plans tend to be cheaper, and better coverage.)

For the time being he’s got Cobra and unemployment insurance and the Fed is picking up 65% of that payment, so he still doesn’t realize what it’s like to be out in the individual market.

I don’t completely understand the new plans, but if they were industry written (and they were), they’re unlikely to favor the consumer over the insurance industry and big business.

In other administration favoring of corporations over the good of the citizens, the Orahma administration has granted at least 27 environmental waivers for drilling while the BP made disaster is ongoing! Heckuva job!

Cynthia Kouril is upstairs!
Citizenship Strippers and Miranda Deniers

The economics are pretty simple. An employer could pay for employees’ ever-rising health care costs or pay a much smaller flat penalty, knowing that a government exchange will pay a significant part of their employees’ costs. While I don’t think most companies will ditch coverage right away in 2014, they will give the exchanges a few years to see if they work. In the long run, a major cut in employer-provided insurance is inevitable.

I have a real hard time believing the only reason employers held onto coverage for years was they feared the bad PR. If this is really just a business decision to save money, the PR shouldn’t matter nearly as much and employers would have cut off benefits a long time ago. But they didn’t, and the health care bill doesn’t change that equation.

That’s why the Fortune story makes no sense, and neither does this interpretation. Health benefits are essentially wages, or even better than wages because they’re untaxed. If these companies drop health care benefits entirely, they’ll be basically giving their employees something like a 20% wage cut (unless they up their wages by an equal amount, in which case they’re not saving money). That’s never going to happen – just like it hasn’t happened in the past – employees will leave in droves.

So it’s neither feature nor bug – the health care bill has no causation in these contemplations by business. Health care costs are rising, and so business contemplates cutbacks, that’s the status quo and the health care bill didn’t change that equation.

“Employees will leave in droves” if employer-insurance is dropped!!!!??

Where have you been in the last few recession-era years?

Yup, I agree that it will be like a 20% wage cut (a feature, not a bug), but that’s the point, hasn’t it been for the last decade or so: more productivity from the workers for less compensation — if you can find a job at all.

The healthy tax cuts business got were probably the reason they kept health care, but not big enuf, so the new healthcare laws were written to get them off the hook, cheap.

For the jobs they haven’t been able to ship to India, that is.

Wages have stagnated, not been cut by 20%. There’s a reason for that.

Leave and go where?

If the job market is so bad that companies can do whatever they want, why haven’t they all cut wages 20% already? What’s stopping them?

Because blatant cutting of wages looks obvious to whistle blowers.

What they do is don’t give you a raise, ever.

I went to work for Pep Boys for 5 years. I started at $10 an hour, I finished at $10.05 an hour, ummm this was before any health care debate. I should mention that the company had a net profit two years in a row and still no increase in pay.

If your working between the margins then you might never see this, but ask any employee of Target, Autozone, Blockbuster, Walmart, etc ,etc and the results are pretty much the same.

These are not entry level jobs as many people would like you to believe and although I want to return to school for different reasons, many people either don’t want to go into debt to go to school or honestly have had enough school and the social/clique-ish nature of it.

70% of the jobs out there are these sorts of services jobs and that has been the case since the 90′s as far as I can tell and consumption is the rule of the day in America.

Most of these jobs makes it hard to get employee health care or make it ridiculously expensive.

I shouldn’t have to keep saying this, health care reform wasn’t reform in changing the Status Quo, it was a exercise in shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic and as I said before, banning Pre-Existing Condition doesn’t mean shit if you can’t get insurance in the first place…

Contractural obligations, for one. For another, the fact that it’s even more cost-effective to just can a bunch of your employees and push their workload onto others…. which is what all the major employers have been doing for over a year.. which I mentioned the other day when this topic came up. For a third, employers don’t want their employees to have *NO* insurance; that leaves them vulnerable to sudden accident or illness. They want their employees covered, at least minimally, enough to keep them coming in to fill their desk. They don’t really care whether the high copays mean the employee’s kids can’t go to college, or that there are no more vacations, or new clothes for school. Just so that they don’t die off before they’ve outlived their usefulness.

So, prior to the Exchange going online, many employers faced the following dilemma: they could offer expensive (to the employer) insurance to their employees, or have their employees have no access to meaningful insurance of any kind. That’s it; those were the only two options.

Now they have a third: they can give their employees access to fairly lousy insurance on the Exchange, and get the taxpayer to pick up a sizeable chunk of what would otherwise have been their contribution. Three options now, now two; they don’t have to pick between relatively good, ERISA regulated coverage and a sickly workforce that’s one lingering cough away from a vacant position.

emptywheel is upstairs!
Joshua Claus: The Rape Threat and the Dead Detainees

Because blatant cutting of wages looks obvious to whistle blowers.

Health care is wages. Same thing.

That doesn’t explain why, after health reform, it’s now suddenly good business for an employer to cut compensation by 20%. Because that’s essentially what cutting benefits is.

I totally agree and as long as companies see much of this stuff as “The cost of doing business”, then there is no incentive for benevolence.

The Government isn’t stupid, its run by many stupid people (see: Wrecking Crew) however they know how to do proper regulation, its just the money takes away political will and as you’ll see with Net Neutrality, there is not political downside to regulating the internet, its vastly too complicated for most to understand and what the right going to really say, Stormfront can’t exisit?

Its only a benefit if you have it or use it, I did neither.

The last time I had any sort of health care coverage was when I drove trucks.

Yes it does. It’s good business because for the employer, health insurance means only two things:

1: Competition for new hires
2: A workforce that isn’t one foot in the grave.

That’s IT. That is all they care about. In the current economy, factor 1 is not in play. We have 16% un/underemployment in this country. You don’t have to compete for new hires much.

So what you have is 2. Keeping your workforce alive. Not happy, not necessarily healthy; alive. Shambling into work.

The Exchange gives them a chance to do that for a hell of a lot less than the average employer contribution to an insurance plan. Just pay the 2k fine and be done with it.

No it’s not, the company pays anyway, it’s insurance. Still costs money and is still basically part of wages.

That’s IT. That is all they care about. In the current economy, factor 1 is not in play. We have 16% un/underemployment in this country. You don’t have to compete for new hires much.

But then why haven’t companies slashed their wages in the last few years? If they can get away with 20% wage cuts because everyone is so desperate for a job, why haven’t wages fallen 20% over the last year or so?

Adding to this one more reason it’s going to be good business:

Because for the next 3 years, every national level Democrat, in a desperate attempt to sell the HCR bill they passed, is going to be screaming, at the top of their lungs and to anyone who’ll listen, that they passed Real Meaningful Universal Health Coverage.

It’s not true of course. But they’ll say it. Which is great messaging help for a company that wants to cut coverage; they can shake their heads, say something about ‘In these troubled economic times’ and then tell their employees not to worry; they’ll still have coverage in the Shiny New Exchange.

They are doing it.

You have to think like a businessman to figure it all out. My last job, in executive management, included being the Health Care Administrator. The amount of paperwork involved now with all these emergency laws dating back to the last months of Bush are expensive vis a vis transactional costs. Not to mention the tax credits leave the company paying more (ARRA) up front until they file their quarterly reports and get the tax credit.

Someone already mentioned they used the “crisis” as an excuse to chop to the bone with “understandable” layoffs. Part of this is due to federal regulations regarding age discrimination. Long term employees tend to be at the top of the pay range.

Next person hired to fill those positions will be making nowhere near what the last person did. Or they will be filled with “contract” employees without the health care costs.

It’s all happening right now, all around you.

Because if they slash wages enough, their employee won’t be able to eat or afford their rent, and homeless hungry workers are sliiiiiightly less desirable in your workforce.

In all seriousness, wage growth is completely flat in the last year. That already represents a substantial cut in wages, when you consider the accompanying cuts in benefits and increased hours many people are facing.

I don’t know if it’s 20%, but it’s huge. And that’s upfront, without a great propaganda partner to help cover up the true extent of the cuts. The claim by many backers of the HCR bill that passed was that people didn’t ‘feel’ the expense of insurance coverage, didn’t understand its true costs and so didn’t cut their trips to doctors, skip doses of prescriptions and what not (those selfish bastards). All of a sudden, when it’s clear that companies plan to rely on that ignorance of the value of private health insurance, it’s the hardest thing in the world to understand! Amazing!

They can try to make this into a PR play, sure, won’t deny that. I don’t think it’ll be successful. In fact, the companies in question in this post already backtracked.

Right, wages have been flat, but completely cutting health benefits is a 20% cut. There’s a big difference.

“If these companies drop health care benefits entirely, they’ll be basically giving their employees something like a 20% wage cut (unless they up their wages by an equal amount, in which case they’re not saving money). That’s never going to happen – just like it hasn’t happened in the past – employees will leave in droves.”

It was that logic that gave us part of the HIR bill with Gruber as the main advocate of that line of thinking. It was claimed that HIR would raise people’s wages!

Let me explain this one more time:

Wages are flat. Hours are way up. Benefits are way down. This amounts to a enormous cut.

We know it’s a cut in practice because productivity is WAY WAY up, and labor costs are crashing:

The crucial reductions came in the item accounting for two-thirds of their costs: labor. In 2009, the Fortune 500 shed 821,000 jobs, the biggest loss in its history — almost 3.2% of its payroll. By mid-2009, companies were making fewer goods with far fewer workers.

A pivotal turn began midyear. Sales bottomed, then began to rise gently, as headcounts continued falling. “The largest part of the gain came from lower payrolls rather than the sluggish rise in sales, but they both contributed,” says Dirk van Dijk of Zacks Equity Research. The result was a wondrous surge in productivity, defined as the hours needed to make a bicycle, a PC, or a ton of insulation.

At the same time, wages rose only slightly. So for all of U.S. industry, the labor costs of creating a good or service — a measure known as unit labor costs — fell by 4.6%, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That’s the sharpest drop in postwar history.

And yet, health benefits still make up about 20% of wages.

My point is yes, benefits have been declining because insurance has gotten more expensive. That’s the status quo. There’s nothing in health reform that changed that equation, at least in the near term. Insurance rates will keep going up, though I believe more slowly than before. So companies will continue shaving off benefits, at least as long as the recession continues for sure. But there’s nothing in the economic of the health care bill that would cause companies that had been previously shaving down benefits slowly to suddenly decide to drop them all at once.

How can you honestly not understand this?

Companies need health insurance. They don’t need great insurance, and they sure as hell don’t want to pay for it if they can avoid it.

The Exchange gives them an out, and the Dems will help sell it.

Without the Exchange, you have the two options I outlined earlier. With it, you get a ‘Third Way’ if you like. That’s the way that the companies Fortune writes about are thinking about.

…benefits have been declining because insurance has gotten more expensive…

Is there a demonstrable cause and effect here?

Here’s Ezra Klein, one of the biggest Bill Backers, arguing precisely the idea that people don’t know how much their insurance is worth compared to wages:

Today, the average employer who offers insurance pays more than 70 percent of a worker’s premiums, all of it tax-free. This amounts to an annual $250 billion subsidy for private insurance for people with good jobs. But it’s not just the size of the subsidy; it’s how we use it that matters. Because it’s only good for insurance that employers buy for their workers, people have their employers buy their health-care insurance for them. But that means individuals don’t know how much their insurance really costs and don’t have as much incentive to keep those costs down. Imagine the pressure for cost control if the 70 percent that employers pay were coming out of our own pockets, instead of quietly coming out of our wages.

So before the bill passes, the argument was that people don’t understand what their insurance costs, don’t know the dollar value, don’t understand its relationship to wages. After the bill passes, the argument is now that it’s impossible to dump employees on the Exchange, because… employees know it’d be a steep cut in wages?

This is definitely a feature. The whole bending the cost curve required that companies stop spending money on insurance. The creeping cadillac tax being just one obvious example. Once companies are force to cut spending on health insurance, the amount of money spent on insurance must drop. Once only the rich can afford health care, those who offer heath services to the rest will be obliged to drop their prices because no one else will be able to afford them. Thus the cost curve will be bent. Of course there will be some hiccups for the unhealthy and uninsured but hey – eggs and omelets.

I understand they don’t want to pay for it, but they can’t cut wages 20% just for the hell of it.

They can’t cut wages 20%, huh?

Is that against the laws of Man, or the laws of Nature? Because apparently a number of Fortune 500 companies are thinking about doing precisely that.

If employers cut all benefits and put employees on the exchange, it’s not like that health care will be free. Some will get subsidies and some won’t. Either way, it’ll be more expensive for workers than the health plans of companies like the ones in question. So yeah, workers are going to get that, and the unions that represent companies like ATT and Verizon definitely get that.

This is not just about companies wanting insured workers, though I agree they do. This is about the simple fact that health benefits are another form of compensation. The health care bill doesn’t change that fact, so that compensation is not simply disappearing at the drop of a hat.

How come they haven’t? Why didn’t they do it last year? Or the year before? If nothing is stopping them, why not do it tomorrow?

Your explanations make no sense in light of the way companies are actually behaving.

David Dayen is upstairs!
Gates Being Completely Disingenuous About DADT

“But there’s nothing in the economic of the health care bill that would cause companies that had been previously shaving down benefits slowly to suddenly decide to drop them all at once.”

HIR was expressly designed to cut workers benefits with the claims that the workers would get a raise in salary:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/27/AR2009122701714.html
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/01/09/gruber-caveats-the-excise-tax-raise-claim/
From the JCT:
When employers offer employees less costly plans, the employees will have less compensation in the form of non-taxable health care benefits and more in the form of [taxable] cash compensation.
I know you understand this because you wrote this:
“What will happen when a 40% excise tax kicks on plans with higher premiums? Companies will lower the value of the plans (lowering the premiums under the threshold for the excise tax) and make up the difference by raising the amount employees have to pay out of pocket. Or, employers could simply cut benefits. In other words the health care that is now paid for by the insurance plan will, after the excise tax, be paid for by the worker. It is possible that cost shifting to the worker could lower costs in the short run if workers don’t spend as much on care, such as not going to the doctor when they have symptoms or postponing that dental clearning. But what if the symptoms were actually the first sign of cancer? Or the lack of preventive dental care led to expensive dental surgery later on? Their delayed care will be more costly – not to mention the consequences for their health.”
http://blog.healthcareforamericanow.org/2010/01/09/the-excise-tax-a-conservative-idea-that-will-only-make-your-health-care-worse/

Right, so if the story in Fortune referenced above was about companies considering cutting health care and making it up in wages, then the cause and effect would make sense. But that’s not what’s being alleged. What Jon Walker is saying is that the health care bill somehow caused these big employers to suddenly think about cutting all health care benefits, without making it up in wages. That’s a ridiculous notion.

Rhetorical question: When does Klein not sound like a mouthpiece for the corporate Ds? Klein says that people have their companies “buy their insurance for them”, which of course means that employees have chosen to be dependent. They chose. Has nothing to do with the fact that even with the so-called health reform people still have very little choice because the Exchange was intentionally designed to not be a competitor to insurance companies. Instead he phrases the situation as if it is the fault of the spendthrift insured. They just need to have the money come out of their own pocket to make them act responsble.

That’s a ridiculous notion.

Because you apparently believe that companies would pay the difference they save on health insurance out of the goodness of their corporate hearts. Now that truly is a ridiculous notion.

I’m really not sure why this is so hard to understand. If companies have so much power that they can just cut 20% off employee compensation with impunity, why haven’t they done it already? Why hasn’t everyone experienced 20% wage cuts in the last year? Surely it’s not the goodness of their corporate hearts holding them back, but something is.

The health care bill does not change that basic calculus.

Ever hard of Circuit City? They fired all their longer-term employees and re-hired them at reduced wages. And productivity is the measure of the cost of producing goods; one of the factors in this cost is labor. When labor costs are reduced, productivity is increased.
Rates will go up, but not so fast? Gee, a friend of mine just got hit with a 39% increase.

You really are determined not to understand this. I’m outlining it one more time, and that’s it. I’m not here to be your tutor today.

Large employers are in effect getting massive cuts in hourly wages by cutting employees instead, and forcing the remaining workers to pick up the slack. Since money is fungible, this has precisely the same cost saving effect as cutting wages but not terminating much of the workforce, with the added benefit that some costs can’t be decreased proportionally along with wages (IE, premiums paid to an insurer, which ATT can’t just say ‘screw it, we’re paying 1/5th less to Blue Cross this year’).

Thus, they already cut wages. Sharply. Their remaining workforce is putting in many more hours per person, or otherwise producing the same output, for mostly the same pay. Is it a 20% cut? I don’t know. The fact is, they chose a different method than the idealized one you have in mind to achieve cost savings. Those savings are real, they exist, they have been achieved. See my comment @42. Productivity gain without wage increase is a PAY CUT. The really big gains over the last year are REALLY BIG CUTS.

So they already have cut wages over the last year. I never said nothing is stopping them from cutting wages further, in fact, I argued precisely the opposite @38, telling you that there was a limit to how far they could cut the wages that employees use to feed themselves. I doubt they’ve reached that limit yet, but they will eventually, and that would be a great incentive to go after other forms of compensation, like health benefits.

The reason the health insurance bill matters is that for some companies, for various reasons, they can’t or won’t have a completely uninsured workforce. But once the Exchange is open, they don’t have to; they can pay a lot less, and get the same workers, more or less. What’s going to happen to them? The *unions* will stop it? Really? The same unions that backed this bill? They’re going to quit their jobs in protest? Flock to another employer eager to pay far more in healthcare costs than their competitor (if they don’t have a non-compete clause in their contracts of course).

So: they have in fact cut wages over the last year, and they can in fact cut them further without putting their employees off health care entirely. That’s a bargain, and that’s why they’ll do it.

“What Jon Walker is saying is that the health care bill somehow caused these big employers to suddenly think about cutting all health care benefits, without making it up in wages. That’s a ridiculous notion.”

Yet you are the one who argued that very notion. Quoting you:
“The idea that if we were forced employers to spend less on health care (by taxing health care plans) they would therefore spend more on wages is not borne out by the evidence.”
“Or, employers could simply cut benefits. In other words the health care that is now paid for by the insurance plan will, after the excise tax, be paid for by the worker.”

Klein disgusts me. He insists the Exchange will bring down costs when he knows that previous Exchanges have failed to do so. He blames people for the costs of their procedures when he’s put up lots of data showing the high costs of procedures are the result of a lack of a central payment negotiatior setting uniform rates.

He’s a classic member of the ‘Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine’ mentality. He should try being on shitty private insurance, denied care, sick and suffering for a few years, it’d add volumes to his understanding of this issue. It did for me.

(Added bonus: nothing my private insurer did to me to keep me from getting the help I needed is illegal under this new bill.)

I agree -

the only positive is the fact that there is now a chunk of money already spent that can be converted to pay the cost of a very basic free Medicare for ages 0 to 64, with buy-in additional Medicare for 0 to 64 to get the 0 to 64 year olds to the over age 64 Medicare level of benefits.

Meanwhile cost controls like Maryland’s hospital mark-up rules/limits are needed in all states – but I do not see the votes until we bankrupt ourselves by giving the health industry corporations whatever they want.

Folks, you have to be sympathetic to poor Jason. Here it is, only weeks after passage of the faux POS HCR and already the cavernous defects are emerging. Previously poor Jason helped sell this POS as a paid employee of HCAN. Now he’s stuck still arguing in favor of it, and he’s not getting paid for it.

Note to Jason: step up your work in the gym. Hit the weights and the cardio hard. You’re gonnna need to be in top shape to keep up the PR fight for this POS you helped support.

I guess we’ll see. I just don’t buy that the economic factors affecting big corporations changed that much with the passage of health reform.

It seems that most are addressing this in the abstract. For me it is personal. I work in a county facility that was sold to a corporation. The first thing they did was to drop all part time employees from accessing the employer health care plan. That was 80% of the workforce in this facility. If you were one of the lucky full time employees, your single person premium went from zero (public) to $200.00 a month No increase in hourly wage was offered. Those employees received an immediate $200.00 a month pay cut. The premium split is 60% employee, 40% employer. Employee turnover was 10%, it is now 50%. The part time employees (some are single moms with children) – oh well, too bad. ‘some were able to put their children on state medicaid, but the parents simply are now without any insurance and hope they stay well. This is story of what is happening here in the march toward “reform”.

If and when employers stop providing health insurance for whatever reason one thing is certain. Employee turnover will increase. Health insurance is the ONLY thing keeping many Americans tied to jobs and employers that they hate. Take this job and shove it will become an option again.

Can’t do it directly to employees, too much bad PR. I’ve been doing temporary work for a division of an extremely large, profitable, international corporation over the past 3 years. Large numbers of employees have been dismissed and brought back as contract workers without benefits. In many cases, temporary positions (and they have a large temporary pool) are paying 15%-18% less than they were 3 years ago. Seems to me this has the equivalent effect on the corporate payroll of at least a 10-12% pay cut for all employees.

The bottom line is Health Insurance “Reform” has much more potential to be a net loss for the middle class (those with gross incomes between $50-$120 thousand / year) than “medicare for all” would have been. At least on economic terms. If you are currently paying $300 / month for insurance with an employer match of 50%, and your emoployer decides to drop coverage, you will probably NOT qualify for subsidies on the exchanges (or very little). And I find it hard to believe that tax incentives will be enough to cover the difference between what your employer was paying, and having to incur the entire cost of insurance yourself (even if you qualify for those incentives).

Its definitely a net win for those makeing less than $50 thousand or so per year. Especially if they have a family.

Its going to be a mixed bag. Some in the middle class may benefit on some level. But my guess is, most won’t.

So, the potential for a middle class backlash does exist. We’ll just have to see how it goes.